Dec. 9, 2025

Updated 8:54 a.m. ET

The one thing that Kamala Harris absolutely, definitely, most certainly does not want to talk about is whether she is thinking about running for president again.

“It’s three years from nooooow,” the former vice president pleaded in an interview last month, sitting in a leather chair backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville before one of the final stops on her nationwide book tour. “I mean, honestly.”

Ms. Harris is busy selling books — a lot of them. She is not yet selling herself.

Old advisers, both allied and estranged, have squinted from afar at her book tour, wondering what exactly her strategy is, or if there is any at all. She has done little to distance herself from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. besides admitting aloud that it was “recklessness” on her part not to have discouraged him from running again. There has been virtually none of the strategic repackaging that a future candidate typically does, the buffing out of flaws and shining up of strengths.

Defeat hit Ms. Harris deeply. She had not felt such grief since the death of her mother, she has said, a line that sears even as she repeats it so often as to become a talking point. She spent the early months of 2025 cooking and cocooning away from the cameras.

But it has been a year since her loss to President Trump, the traditional period of mourning.

Friends and allies swear she is more relaxed now. She is certainly more relaxed about swearing.

On a recent long-form podcast, the likes of which she got so much heat for avoiding last year, Ms. Harris let fly a two-word phrase — rhyming with “bucket” — to describe her new ethos. She says she is now on her “freedom tour.”

This is Kamala Harris unleashed. But it is still Kamala Harris, the profanity a proxy for plain-spokenness. She is the first woman to serve as vice president, and well attuned to the double standards of gender and race. Lawyerly language remains her safe space, and she still defaults to acting as if every question is part of a deposition where answers can and will be used against her.

She has mostly been a bystander in the Democratic Party’s raging debate over its direction. Should Democrats veer to the left or center? More populism? More progressivism? Both? Neither? What exactly should the party stand for?

“This sounds really corny,” she said in the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times in Nashville. “But we have to stand for the people. And I know that that sounds corny. I know that. But I mean it. I mean it.”

This portrait of the former vice president at a pivot point was reported through interviews with more than two dozen current and past advisers and others close to her, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Ms. Harris has made clear she doesn’t “feel burdened” — yes, she still uses that phrase — by where she fits in the punditry pecking order or the polls or the cable chyrons. She is enjoying the freedom from what she calls the “transactional” constrictions of campaigning, of asking people for a vote.

Her place in history is already secure, and she knows it.

“I understand the focus on ’28 and all that,” she said in the interview. “But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

The crowd in Nashville was just starting to line up around the block. Big, cheering, adoring. Only two politicians in America have pulled off nationwide tours this year and packed so many venues. One is Bernie Sanders. He is 84, a figure in his final act. The other is Ms. Harris, 61.

After years of being hailed as the future — the “female Barack Obama” label came as early as 2009, when she was still just a district attorney — Ms. Harris is suddenly at risk of her time having passed.

Yet people aren’t just showing up for her. They’re paying to see her.

“Thousands of people are coming to hear my voice. Thousands and thousands,” she said. “Every place we’ve gone has been sold out.”

The question is what she wants to say.

Can Harris build back better?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497246)

Kamala Harris's memoir: "...and since I'd achieved all of my goals as Vice President, there was no need to become the President. The End."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497252)

It was a striking statement from a politician who spent her career inside government, a Black woman who had to persuade her family of the value of working in a prosecutor’s office, of making change from within. But what she sees as the “capitulation” of American institutions to Mr. Trump — law firms, universities, the news media — has shaken her confidence in the old order.

Now she faces a crossroads — between her instincts as an incrementalist insider and the present demands of so many for transformational thinking.

The mission statement of her new nonprofit group, KDH for the People, is so broad as to be unobjectionable to almost anyone: “To strengthen communities across America through the promotion of economic opportunity, justice and protection of fundamental freedoms.”

If Ms. Harris were to run again, it is almost anyone’s guess what the campaign would be about.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497260)

Their relationship is complex, to say the least. In her book, she needled him by revealing that he never returned her call the day Mr. Biden dropped out. “Hiking. Will call back,” he texted.

(Incidentally, Mr. Newsom said on a podcast at the time that he had been on a treadmill; an aide clarified that he was initially on a treadmill and later went on a hike.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497271)

He said she had a pithy reply of her own: “On book tour. Get back to you later.”

“Anyway,” Mr. Newsom said with a laugh, “that’s the relationship.”

Representatives for both declined to comment on the texts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497274)

💅💅💅

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5808422&forum_id=2.#49497276)